PC163: The Landholders No Longer Carry Swords

[Listener]

<EDIT>

Once I got over the rather annoying way that no one had a name (though it was explained later in the story)...

When did that happen? Did I miss it?
</EDIT>

There was a throwaway line about "use-names". Blink your ears and you'll miss it.

[Max e^{i pi}]

I've been rather busy lately, and do have some catching up to do.
It therefore turned out that I had listened to 162 and 163  back-to-back followed by some other podcasts.
This probably gave me a skewed perception of how much padding and in how many episodes this was.

Also, Dave, I prefer running outdoors. And trying to keep a steady pace, dodge vehicles, small children and dogs while your adrenaline addled brain tries to get your fingers to manipulate little buttons is harder than it sounds.
When are we going to get mind-reading mp3 players?

[DKT]

When are we going to get mind-reading mp3 players?

Hopefully, sooner than we get jetpacks and flying cars! 

[Wilson Fowlie]

It shouldn't require mind-reading. For a player that has a simple microphone that can pick up changes in the level of ambient noise and automatically adjust the volume level appropriately, not unlike noise-canceling headphones, the tech already exists.  Just requires someone to put it all together.

[yicheng]

And I found it entirely Chinese. I suppose the author should be complimented for so completely detaching it from an actual historical context -- or blending in a number of historical contexts.

I disagree.  It wasn't so much Chinese as Feudal.  All the stuff about oldest & youngest daughters, sons, and son-in-laws do seem Confucian, however.  The strict social laws and association of swords with aristocracy actually struck me as Japanese to be honest.  I agree about the use of socio-political themes from history.  Too many fantasy stories seem to focus only on princesses, knights, and dashing brigands.  The author deserves kudos for making his MC an old matriarch.

[mbrennan]

I wanted to like this more than I did, but ultimately it felt like an overly-simplistic story about revolution.  It didn't really get into the political messiness of such things in reality; when it came time to man the barricades, it sounds like everybody who said they would show up actually *did* show up, and they brought friends, and nobody sold anybody out to the landholders, nor did anybody get into local disagreements about who ought to be in charge, etc.  Which, okay, it's a short story, and that kind of messy complexity is hard to do in a few thousand words.  But it also failed (at least for me) to do the thing short stories can do really *well*, which is to dig into the characters at the moment of transition.  I never felt invested in the narrator or the Younger Son-in-Law, never felt a sense of them being really torn or afraid or outraged or any of the other really meaty, awesome emotions that ought to come with a shift like this.  (I think the lack of names contributed to this; it made me see all the characters as mouthpieces instead of people.)  On top of that, the setting felt vague.  People here have seen shades of a bunch of different societies in it, and that works for a thought-piece, but I don't find it makes for compelling narrative.  So the end result is that I thought the story was really preachy, and not very compelling at all.

As for monarchy, my thoughts are too long to fit here, so: http://www.swantower.com/essays/philosophy/monarchy.html .

[Tori]

I would wager that the ambiguity was purposeful.  The whole point of the story was about how a revolution gets started, not whether or not a revolution is justified or wise. 

Thank you Scattercat for stating this. I am surprised by the number of respondents who don't like the story because they don't have a more complete point of view (pov) or have a problem with the politics. For me what is so compelling is precisely the limited pov, that we don't have the complete picture. I find fascinating what the story's detractor's find disturbing. It was well-done and rigorously limited.

[LaShawn]

I love the narration of this one, but not so much the story itself. I kept getting confused over who was who. And the protag was so skeptical throughout the story, her change of heart at the end felt abrupt to me. In fact, the entire ending felt like it came out of left field. I almost wished that the 2nd (third, last i dont know) son was wrong, or that the landowners were doing something completely different, like fighting aliens or something. I don't know. Conspiracy theorist always rubbed me the wrong way, and that's what this story did,too. But great narration, though.

And speaking of conspiracy theories, uh...Wilson? Please don't tell me you were sitting at your computer day and night, waiting for someone, anyone, to post to the forums about the dead air after podcasts just so you can whip out that spiffy chart. Or at least tell me you only spent at the maximum five minutes working on it...

[Wilson Fowlie]

And speaking of conspiracy theories, uh...Wilson? Please don't tell me you were sitting at your computer day and night, waiting for someone, anyone, to post to the forums about the dead air after podcasts just so you can whip out that spiffy chart. Or at least tell me you only spent at the maximum five minutes working on it...

Well, about 5 minutes listening to the episodes listed and marking down the dead air times.

Probably about 5 times that, making a pretty chart. Not wasted time, in my opinion, as it was something I'd never done before so was happy to have the chance to try my hand at. (Not that I'd never done anything like it before - I've made HTML tables, so it didn't take as long as it might have otherwise.) Also, the superscripting took some time to make look good.

[Wilson Fowlie]

For those of you who want democratic revolutions in your fantasy, check out today's The Big Idea entry in John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

In the real world, restoring absolute monarchs to power is generally not seen as a good thing. I mean, an absolute monarch is just a dictator with a jeweled hat, when you come right down to it. In the real world, we (well, most of us, at least) celebrate the overthrow of tyrants…even the ones that have been, perhaps, less tyrannical than some of their peers.

Where, I asked myself, are the democratic revolutionaries within fantasy fiction?

I decided to create some.

[Unblinking]

More political fiction.  Yay...

I gave this one a fair try, but I'll admit that the head's up that it was a political story biased me against it.  I listened for a while, and it just never got my interest.  From the intro and comments I assume that a revolution starts based on the wild and unbased speculation at the beginning, but I got sick of listening to them arguing about things that no one has actually seen.  And, the non-name naming scheme drove me absolutely nuts.  Presumably there's a reason for it, but it made it hard to keep any of the characters straight or get any feeling for personality or even count.  After a while I realized I was doing nothing but trying to count how many different non-names were used, which was more interesting to me than the argument they were having.

[justenjoying]

This seemed like another uprising in the feudal trope of fantasy. It was way to long and not done nearly as well as Borgis. I was underwhelmed with this one.

[DKT]

THREADOMANCY!!!!

Saw this on SF Signal and was reminded of Anna's question in the intro.

[Devoted135]

THREADOMANCY!!!!

Saw this on SF Signal and was reminded of Anna's question in the intro.

Nice! Lots of great perspectives represented, and of course lots of insight as well.